Alysa Liu breaks Team USA’s 24-year Olympic gold medal drought in women’s figure skating

Team USA women’s figure skater Alysa Liu won gold in the women’s free skate final on Thursday, ending a 20-year medal drought for American women in the event and a 24-year gold drought.

The last American woman to win an individual figure skating medal at the Olympics was Sasha Cohen at the 2006 Turin Games. And the last American woman to win a gold medal in individual figure skating was Sarah Hughes, who accomplished that achievement in 2002, when the Winter Games were held in Salt Lake City.

She performed all of her jumps and smiled throughout, bursting into a demonstrative celebration after finishing. She shouted, “That’s what I’m talking about!” and “Holy shit!” while celebrating with his team.

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Liu finished with a total score of 226.79, a free skate score of 150.20 and a short program score of 76.59. It was his best free skate score of the season.

But she had yet to see her Japanese rivals Kaori Sakamoto and Ami Nakai challenge her.

Sakamoto finished right behind Liu. Nakai seemed to get much closer and there was noticeable tension in the crowd as the judges reviewed Nakai’s moves before handing out their final score. But once they announced that Nakai had come up short, the crowd erupted in celebration for Liu.

Liu was the only American woman to qualify for a shot at the podium after Tuesday’s short program after teammates Amber Glenn and Isabeau Levito fell short.

All the pressure was on Liu to win gold for the United States in an individual figure skating event after her teammates fell short.

Liu has become a US fan favorite this year, playing a key role in helping her country win gold in the team event after her dramatic comeback story. He has just returned to the world stage after a brief retirement following his performance at the Beijing 2022 Winter Games.

Before her appearance at the Beijing 2022 games, she and her father were the target of a spy operation by the Chinese government.

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Liu called the experience “a little strange and exciting.”

“You know what I mean? It’s so… unbelievable. You know what I mean, that’s crazy,” Liu previously told News Digital in a roundtable interview at the USOPC Media Summit in October.

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“Imagine finding out that at such a young age. I mean, in a weird way, I was like, ‘Am I like on some prank show?’ Is this world real? I must be some movie character. But, I mean, it was like it made sense to me, you know, because of everything my father did in his activist days.”

He does not rule out adapting his life and experience in an international espionage incident to film.

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Still, he has some preferences if his story makes it to the big screen.

“They have to make me look like some super cool hero or something. And I can’t just be the girl who got spied on and didn’t do anything about it,” she said.

“But honestly, I would focus on my father’s story, because his story is great and also like everything that happened because of what he did. So, I feel like we have to start with the roots.”

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